THE HEART OF THE HEARTLAND

September 29 - October 4, 2013 - COLDWATER, OHIO 

We have just spent the last five days at VJ’s Family Resort  in Coldwater, Ohio and are now heading for Kentucky on the down home stretch.

The Pond looks great although down about 18 inches.  Guess it’s been awhile since they’ve had any rain.  Dave came down with a cold so we pretty much did nothing for five days. 

I watched about 1800 hours of Food Channel and HGTV and caught up with my network shows that have been premiering all week.  Haven’t had TV since July.

Had great visits with VJ and Mert and made our run to Winer’s butcher shop for very fine Midwestern steaks.  Stocked the MH freezer with six very healthy looking porterhouse steaks and five pounds of Dave’s favorite sausage.   Amazing how much the MH freezer will hold.

Everything is winding down on the farms.  The corn is dry in the field and getting mowed down.  The air is ripe with manure  which I sometimes confuse with our holding tank except we are using VJ’s facilities and not the MH’s.   Saw stinkbugs in the MH and was afraid we brought them with us, but Coldwater has its own stinkbug communities.  I'm afraid there will be transplants to Florida.

The weather was overcast with misty rain and temps in the low 80’s.  Seems a warm October.  The last time we visited in October  it was in the 30’s!  Guess you never know!  

Had our quota of fried tenderloin sandwiches were are truly worthy of two hamburger rolls or one hue hoagie role rather than just one puny hamburger roll.   

 I KID YOU NOT!  THIS IS WHAT YOU GET!!!!!

Our last evening was great fun!  After dinner at Southsides we drove over to Ben’s, a general mercantile store owned by friends of VJ’s and Mert’s.  The owners are from Kankakee so Dave had a great time playing “who do you know” when we visited in July.

Our mission was to find three greeting cards for   VJ to send out and we read and laughed over just about every one on the rack.  It was a riot.   We’d read the cards and pass them around so all four of us were laughing in the card aisle. 

After about an hour’s worth of really good fun, VJ zeroed in on the three cards he thought appropriate for his purposes.  He also picked up three  small Christmas trees decorations, which we debated about at some length, for his office. Spent about five minutes debating whether we should purchase a box of Edna Price chocolates.  If they had smaller boxes we probably would have.  I still have Murduck's fudge in the MH.

By the time we left Ben’s it was dark and close to 8PM.  VJ laughs….just some small town fun……can’t remember the last time I had so much fun in a store! 

Hated to say good bye and hope they’ll come to Florida in the winter.  All the kids are now off to school so they have an “empty nest” and feeling the quiet.  I give them a few months and it will be the norm and when the kids come home, the ab-norm!

Driving down Rte 127 the skies still haven’t gotten too clear.  I won’t miss the smell of manure that permeates the air but there is a beauty to this area.  Small communities stretched among the farms.  Each community, however small, so strong in their commitment to their neighbors, towns and schools.   This is small town America at its best.  It  has truly earned the right to be in the heartland!

Oct 4 Fort Boonesborough SP, Richmond, Kentucky

After a seven hour, tooth rattling, head jarring ride from Ohio to Ft Boonesborough, nothing tasted better than a cold beer under the awning.  The air is still and hot.  Eighty plus degrees…..in October?

A group of four campers are sitting at the picnic table in the next campsite.  One by one they get up and mosey out into the road to look up at a tree.

Nothing piques interest more than having four people wander over to a tree, shield their eyes and look up.  To further draw you in, you hear the word “snake” and now you’ve got 6-8 people wandering out into the street to look up into a tree. 

One person says “it’s a snake and it’s coiled around the branches”. 

Another says, “I don’t know, but that kind of looks like a head”. 

I wander over to the group and look up into the high branches of the tree.  It doesn’t look like a snake to me, but I couldn’t tell you what it looks like.

No one seemed to have any binoculars so I brought my camera out with the telephoto lens.  Mystery solved.  It is not a snake coiled up on a branch with its head raised up.  It’s fungus imitating a snake!

AHHHHH.......LIFE IS GOOD IN THE SLOW LANE!